E-mail attachment problems




I've heard that adding attachments to e-mail messages can be a pretty complex affair. My personal experience is that adding an attachment results in the receiver getting gibberish at the end of the message. This happens for text and graphics files.
I work for the State Government and all attachments sent internally arrive as attachments, no drama. But when I send e-mail with an attachment to an external address, the attachment appears at the end of the message as rubbish. Is there an easy solution, or will I have to wait a few years for technology to catch up on this one?
- David Ehmer


Internet e-mail standards were developed to handle only text. To send binary information it has to be coded in text (this is the gibberish that you see). Until a few years ago when MIME was developed there was no Internet standard for this, but some default standards were used.
The three common techniques are UUENCODING, BINHEX encoding and the Internet standard MIME encoding. Most recent releases of Internet e-mail packages support all three. Older versions of the same software may not. Either persuade your e-mail recipients to upgrade their e-mail packages or try resending the file using a different encoding scheme.
Also there are many freeware/shareware software packages they can use to decode the files independently of e-mail software such as WINCODE and WINZIP. Download these from the PC World Software page.
- Roy Chambers


Category: Internet, Communications
Issue: Feb 1997
Pages: 161

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